The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has recently been on a rampage many are now calling ‘America's Summer of the Wild Horse and Burro Wipe-Out.’
BLM has grossly misused the Wild Horse and Burro Protection Program for years, managing for Extinction, rather than Preservation.
Instead of protecting America’s beloved wild horse and wild burro herds, BLM has increasingly been giving in to endless pressure from Washington lobbyists and special interest groups such as big game hunting, mining, oil drilling, development, and cattle ranching.
On September 29, 2009, BLM plans to permanently erase California's last wild burro herds from the Mojave Natural Preserve.
Since last month alone, BLM has also eliminated 12 wild horse herds, along with 1.6 million acres of legally designated land in Ely, Nevada. These historical bloodlines are lost forever. In Wyoming, BLM recently seized 300 horses. In Challis, Idaho, a roundup of 400 horses left six dead and six foals orphaned.
BLM also recently reduced Cloud's Herd, a wild horse herd famously documented on PBS’s Nature series, to 120 horses -- too few for genetic viability. And they have removed the herd's ‘elders,’ horses crucial to this herd's survival.
But BLM is not finished with its horrendous extinction plans. In upcoming weeks, 270 wild horses will vanish from Caliente, Nevada. Over 200 others will be confiscated from ranges in Idaho; 450 in Tobin, Nevada; nearly 500 in Oregon; and 650 in California. Wyoming's Red Desert Complex will lose 700 wild horses, including 250 foals.
And despite BLM’s denial, America’s wild horses are now commonly being sold off to ‘kill buyers,’ and are being cruelly and callously shipped off to slaughterhouses in both Canada and Mexico.
Many of us who still believe that we Americans should be protecting our remaining wild animals, believe that the 19 million acres that BLM has illegally taken from these wild horses and burros should be returned to them, and that BLM should be managing these herds on their land, not rounding them up and hauling them off to government holding pens, where they will horrendously end up at ‘kill buy’ auctions.
Please contact both your elected officials and the Bureau of Land Management, and demand an immediate stop to removal of wild burro herds in the Mojave Desert on 9/29/09.
And I hope you will join us in advocating a termination of these government roundups; a termination of both special interest deals and foreign slaughterhouse deals, and a return to holding our government accountable for their non-compliance with laws that are meant to shield our once treasured American wild horse and burro herds from certain extinction.
There isn’t very much time left.
AM
That hears familiar, isn't? That's the response we all get from the politician representing us and doing what we tell them to do, right?!
Oh man! on what planet we live?
Georg